Tales of Sunrise
by MiddayFiddler
Summary: "The sun coming up every day is a story." (Collection of short stories featuring various characters, pairings and settings with the common time of daybreak.)
1. Drown

**Drown**

(Hasegawa/Hatsu)

He forgets how uncomfortable kneeling is.

The pavement makes him remember; sharp pebbles make him feel as if his knees were to break into pieces and tiny stones of gravel sink into the flesh of his palms. His arched back reminds him sharply that it is ten, twenty years too late to do what he is doing now.

He does not listen. Recently he seems to be listening only to his conscience and bottles of cheap sake and both talk to him in Gintoki's voice.

This part of town is uncomfortably quiet. There is not a single light to be seen through the paper doors, not a single lantern marking a place where to get a drink or which is better to avoid.

In Kabukicho, those are usually one and the same. But this is not Kabukicho, and he finds it difficult to believe that there are people who sleep at night and wake in the morning, eat breakfast miso on their porches and kiss their wives before leaving. People content with their lives to the point when they sleep through the sunrise instead of drinking last drops of soju before closing the noodle stall or pushing palms on their eyelids in frantic effort to make the nightmares go away.

(He told him he would not tell anyone. He did not tell him that everyone already knew.)

The estate is spacious, easily taking in the area of half of Kabukichou. It seems to him that any minute, it will devour the town hungrily, narrow streets of tiny paper houses, the outskirts lined with never lit lanterns, the river bank seeped with smell of fish and garbage and rot.

He wonders if he felt such an awe back then as well. He does not remember; all he can recall is sight of his own sandals and her arched back in front of them. She was clad in green kimono

(and it was cheap green of cheap fabric and it was making her face look thin and ill and his shoes were cheap and chipped from him stumbling on the pavement tiles and the rim of his hakama was ripped and he felt like he would desecrate her by asking her to repair it)

and he does not want to remember, does not want to relive the feelings he could never describe with words, because he is not a poet and not a scholar and not anything else that would make him worth her. Love, mostly love, but it was that kind of love that should have never existed, that constricts you around your neck like a rope, that ties your wrists with barbed wire and fills your throat with bile, because nothing is enough, nothing can ever be enough and you drown and watch your wife beg for you and her parents, her own parents-

His cheek lying on the concrete is wet. The dew fell, he notices. The sun will rise soon to its full, people will wake (and eat breakfast miso on their porches and kiss their wives before leaving, just like people do, the ones not drowning and not suffocating) and will find him, unshaved man dressed in rags, smelling like bad liqour and garbage and sweat, bowing on their front road. He sighs and stands, sharp stones leaving dents in his shins. He never looks on the house. It was not important in the first place.

"Tommorrow," he mutters and it sounds like blabbering of drunkards, and maybe is. "I'll go there, tommorrow."

The clap of his sandals long resonates in the waking neighbourhood.


	2. Cinders

**Cinders**

(Hijikata/Mistuba)

„You don't have to do morning patrols."

„I know," he says, and stumbles upon a bundle of crumpled old newspaper. The bundle is lying helplessly in the middle of the street, pale and creased and smudged with black stains from streams of endless rainpours like face of a hostess right after a dawn.

He attempts to light a cigarette. But the dew has not set yet, and the air is heavy and humid. He fumbles with a plastic switch of a lighter until his fingertips feel numb. He would curse, but the officer of the night patrol is long gone and there is no point when there is nobody to see him. The Demonic Vice Commander curses and shouts and threatens. Hijikata Toushiro chews unlit cigarette until the paper breaks and bitter taste of tabacco fills every pore of his mouth to the point it hurts.

He hates morning patrols.

Everyone does. Kabuki-chou is hideous in the light. And thrice as much in that faint white mist that comprises of petrol fumes and flickering neon lights and precipitated air breathed out of lungs of countless beings wandering the streets and sake stands and host clubs. They are all asleep now, in a dreamless drunken haze, with drink coasters plastered on their cheeks. Hijikata assumes. He never felt any need to join them in their vain search for entertainment or forgetness or meaning of life or whatever are you searching for in the bottom of booze cup.

He assumes that as well; maybe they are not searching for anything.

He spits out crumbled tabacco leaves in the general direction of trash bags and leans on the wall next to the already closed snack bar. A cat with one eye and half a tail is sleeping on its threshold. Its ginger fur moves softly with each breath and had he been more of a poet, he would say that it embodies the whole town in its hideousness and beauty and whatever else could be said about Kabuki District.

„You wouldn't like it here," he says instead to the empty air, and watches the cat startle and look at him judgmentally with one amber eye before returning back to sleep.

He does not say anything else after that. He takes out another cigarette to chew and, with a feeling of yet another fullfilled duty, moves down the street on the prescribed route of mornig patrol.

He carefully avoids the bundle of newspapers, pale and creased and smudged like face of a woman that never let anyone see her cry.


	3. Funeral Rites of Swallows in Spring

Tumblr Joui Week Day 2: Bonds

* * *

Koutarou's granny used to say she would like to die in spring.

Koutarou remembers asking her all over again, because it seemed weird to ponder about dying when cherry trees bloom and grass gets green and swallows return to their nest under their porch's roof. He had never gotten an answer. Then he stopped asking, because sometimes, answers don't come easily and sometimes, there are no answers at all.

It's not spring now.

Koutarou is not sure which season it is. They all seem to merge into a blur of colours, scents and feelings with no distinction but the ever-present smell of blood and sweat and dying grass stepped into infertile soil. There are no trees on the battlefield, no birds except ravens, and ravens don't come in any other season except season of death. They follow them even away from battles, having taken a liking in Gintoki, and sometimes Koutarou wonders if maybe they are swallows turned into corpse devourers by some unfortunate occurence.

At first they reminded him of Gintoki, but now they remind him of all three of them.

The monk from the half-crumbled shrine uphill does not refuse to chant sutras. He does not, because he doesn't even leave his bedroom, where he promptly barricades himself into. Koutarou ponders using a sword against frail paper walls, but he's not sure if it would count.

He's not sure if he wants someone to chant funeral sutras anyway. There is a statue of Buddha in the temple, and it has a sword but no sheath.

He returns to simmering embers, empty clearance and even emptier money sack. He doesn't hold it against any of them. There are many ways of coping, and some of them don't include washing dried blood from the decapitated head of once respected mentor. Or beloved father.

He hasn't seen Gintoki since the night after.

The cloth is black from soaked blood. He cuts off a piece from his own kimono. He apologizes for not having a hairbrush or inscence, and it isn't until later that he realizes he does it aloud. He washes the body with the water from river and doesn't cry, because there is work to be done and with tears in eyes it wouldn't be done well.

The hardest and saddest thing is to bury own children, his granny said as she was washing the burial stone over her bride's grave, then her son's grave, then the grave she had prepared for herself long before she needed one.

There is no one to clean her grave now, he thinks and then remembers that if she hadn't died, maybe she would still sit on the porch and eat manjuu from lacquered tray and wonder if she would pour water over her grandchild's grave soon, too.

He makes a promise not to die soon. He wonders if making promises with blood beyond the nails counts as sacrilege.

Shinsuke returns with setting sun. His sword is chipped and his sleeves are stained, he smells of perfume and he hides his face.

Koutarou tells him there is no dinner and he does not answer. He does not look at the body covered with green linen stained with grass and mud. He cries from sleep and Koutarou starts chanting what he remembers from sutras from granny's funeral, because he knows Shinsuke does not want to be heard in his grief and guilt and absolute, impenetrateble loneliness.

Gintoki does not come, not at sunset, not at dawn.

(He does not come until later, when the body rests in a grave Koutarou dug barehanded. He comes with a flock of ravens and dead eyes and a dead swallow to cook for dinner and Koutarou thinks that maybe, just maybe sensei is happy, because all of them are doing the best they can.)


	4. Crown

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p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"'Are too. And be quiet.'/p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"The soft pale glow of nearing dawn seeps through the paper door. The room is coated in a veil of silver and it should be nice outside, all pretty colours and scent of dew and clatter of paper lanterns being put down from the fronts of shops Sensei never lets them go into. Gintoki has more important job this morning./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p  
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p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Shinsuke's weaving daisies into the braid, the ones they gathered in the dark before they opened their flowers. His fingers are quick and careful, more fitted for playing on strings than playing for war. Gintoki does not envy him. He did, for three long days, before they both turned up with matching black eyes and cut lips and Zura's disdainful look aimed at them./p  
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p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"'No. Let's go.'/p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"None of them see Sensei smile under his crown of green, in the shy silver morning light./p 


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